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Mr F.

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Just a note before you start reading. I originally wrote this full of expletives. To get the real feel of what I mean you can substitute the “f***ed-bomb” wherever I’ve used “messed”.

We need a reset button. A reset button for education. We need to try turning it off and on again. Somewhere along the way we messed up. I mean the collective we of course, the multi-generational we that has systematically messed up education and reduced it to a numbers game; a keno with a few winners and many more losers.

A reboot wouldn’t be enough though would it? We’d still have the same guts in the machine. The same ghosts of mass education’s factory fodder origins. The same targeted curriculum areas, same bias, same old same old. Same shit, different day. And still messed up.

I’ve lost count of the number of curriculum review meetings I’ve been to. You know the ones. Where we sit around with pens and paper, cutting and pasting learning outcomes, achievement objectives, rubrics and processes until they look different, but say the same. Maybe we’ll plug in an ICT component, you know, so it’s integrated. A semantic shuffle and same old messed up same old.

So a reset for education isn’t enough. We need something bigger, more drastic. It’s messed up and we keep trying to fix it by narrowing focus, shaving corners, bolting on new subjects and reordering others.

Sir Ken Robinson and others talk about a learning revolution, but what does that mean?

Given a clean slate how would you set about creating a new education system? Would it be location based? What role would institutions play, if any? What would you include, how would it be weighted, what would its purpose be? There are plenty of posts and ideas about personalized learning, creativity based learning, pull vs push and lifelong learning, but what would any of these look like?

and don’t forget the “glass” wall at the beginning of the Microsoft Future Vision 2019 video. That’s not a glass wall, its a touch screen offering real time translation of voice and text. The children could be separated by half a world.

Is the combined DNA of these products a likely future tool of interactive education? Or will schools, as we know them, have ceased to exist by then?